free software, why?

[peekaboo]

i cannot understand why there are free products available.
people spend a lot of time, money and effort creating software, so why do they offer it for free?
I could understand if they were making money from ads or something.
Skype promises to stay free forever. I use it and I love it but what do they gain by offering it gratis?

[DonVito]

Alot of the times, they hope that youll like the free one so much, that youll buy the one you have to pay for, to get a bunch of extra features. Or its just to get thier companies name out there.

[pillainp]

There is also a lot of public spirit about.

As AMD Freak said, sometimes its about letting you get to know the free version well enough that you will buy a paid version with a few more features. Skype itself, for example is free, but there are two premium services the company offers (or will in the near future) that will be paid for, called SkypeIn and SkypeOut, which let you make calls to PC's from mobiles and vice versa.

[peekaboo]

i use skypeout, but that's only cause some people are not aware of how wonderful skype is. once everyone installs skype, i won't need skypeout.
skype promises to be free forever.
What about AVG or Zonealarm?
public spirit is great, but it doesn't buy a lot of groceries.

[Strider]

A lot of time people develope Free Software just for the love of it, Motherboard Monitor used be developed by a guy who just love developing it until he move on to better things. Bitpim is another free program that comes to the Top of my head, I used to develope free programs for BBS system the I ran (Before the Internet took off) and for me it was just a hobby that I loved doing.

[trowand]

Lots of times free software is owned by huge companies that really don't need the money and would rather give it away for free and use it as advertising. For example, two of my favorite freeware programs, Picasa is owned by Google and Konfabulator is owned by Yahoo. Also a lot of free games are really old that the company has already made money on and they know that no one would pay money for it now so they give it away for free.

[Ind-PC_student]

Free software is made by more people then you'll think there something called open source applications, which is made by users, who simply are not very impressed with some of the commercial software.

And of course some people like the FOSS [Free Open Source Software] for its price but there are those who like it more for its its GPL style licenses which gives users more rights and the oportunity to make improvements giving some of the users the oportunity to learn more about the developing process and more important the feedback is more apreciated.